Tag Archives: ranting

Today was the day my Mum was scheduled to have complex spinal surgery. My plan was to drive the 159 miles to be with her. So at 9am I began packing the car and getting ready to leave. I then received a phone call from my brother asking me where I was.

“I’m still at home” I replied.

“Good,” he said. “Stay there. They’ve just cancelled the op.”

Over the course of the ensuing ten minutes I came to understand that the surgeon called a halt to the proceedings because the operating theatre had the wrong table in it.

I began to feel angry and sad, and confused. I heard the tears in Mum’s voice. She’d been terrified of this procedure, and to have it denied her in the eleventh hour was piling on the agony. She was even gowned up and had a line drawn on the skin of her back to mark the incision point.

Yet the surgeon refused to proceed with the wrong table in theatre. He explained that he was not prepared to risk it as he has to work within a tenth of a millimetere from a nerve that if damaged would result in paralysis.

In a quiet moment of reflection after I put down the phone I realised that everything is working out perfectly.

Through this aborted process Mum got to see how much care and attention was being paid to her.

For example, there were 6 people on the team for her op – plus the lead surgeon – and including one guy who’d driven 189 miles to be there. Mum was the only one on today’s roster. All these people had gathered just for her.

And the fact that the surgeon was prepared to send everyone home and cancel the op rather than run the risk ought to offer Mum a good deal of reassurance about his conscientiousness and duty of care.

I then realised something quite bizarre: that between us Mum and I managed to attract the cancellation. Through her fear and my resistance to her fear together we have conspired to co-create the eventuality of this operation not going ahead.

In other words, while she was harbouring mortal fears about the procedure, I was pressing for optimism, healing and mobility. We were pulling in opposite directions, and in the process managed to cancel out the op.

I am blown away. I am so grateful for this lesson. And I am also appreciating that Mum and I have another chance to prepare for this operation with less fear and resistance, and more trust and confidence.

Everything is working out perfectly.

In the light of this my reflections are that journaling can be a very powerful magnet for our lived experience. However we express ourselves in writing can play a part in how we shape our lives.

So if we frequently use our journals to rant words of anger and bitterness, then we reinforce angry and bitter experiences in our reality.

If we use our journals to write our appreciations and love letters, then we enhance our reality with loving and appreciative experiences.

In fact, whether we write it or not, our lived experience will be affected by how we feel.

And it’s important to know that there isn’t always a counterweight (my resistance to Mum’s fear) to neutralise our fear, anger or bitterness. Sometimes we create our own momentum, and whether it’s good or bad, positive or negative, the more we feel it, the more we attract it.

Pay attention to the outcomes you are attracting. And use your journal as a tool to reinforce the feelings that will create the outcomes you desire, rather than perpetuate those you don’t.

Our journal writing workshop last evening was yet again a wonderful opportunity to share insights and learn new perspectives. My gratitude goes to workshop participant Elinor who shared a wonderful phrase that somehow landed quite forcefully with me. She said: “Necessity has no emotion.”

The reason why this hit me with such a clunk is because it seems to account for what I have found in my journal beyond the ranting. Once I’ve stripped away the whining voice of my inner critic or the exclamation marks of my ego; when I’ve named and shamed the stuck-on-repeat stories with which I’ve been comforting myself, and once I’ve come to terms with my main vulnerabilities, what’s left is a calm, balanced narrative in which I’m finally able to speak my truth. There are no exclamation marks here. No over-blown claims about my own brilliance. No excuses and convoluted reasons why I won’t/shan’t/can’t. Just calm, logical, plain, straight-forward truth. Well hello.

Inner wisdom and authenticity are the pearls I’m constantly encouraging my workshop participants to pursue. These are the buried treasures that our journals can reveal to us, but from whose scent the decoys and false trails of our inner critic, our stories, excuses and egoist self-justifications often throw us. How easily we become distracted and displaced! But every pearl needs its grit. It would be foolish though to mistake the grit for the final product!

In Elinor’s insight I’m seeing that authenticity is akin to necessity. Our authentic self is who we necessarily are – who we cannot avoid being, no matter how many layers of negativity, self-judgement and self justification we heap on top. And when we hear its voice we find pearlescent peace, quiet and truth.

Our journals bring us face to face with unpalatable truths about our human nature. They give us the space to rant and to get things off our chest – then surely we can move on?

Ranting is the double-edged sword of journaling. It can be cathartic, but it can also amplify those aspects of ourselves which are false and inauthentic. Our rants are often driven by our inner critic, by our ego, by the stories that we’ve made up about others, and by endless excuses and self-justifications about why we’re not just getting on with the things we want to do.

Ranting is often the beginners’ level of journaling. When our journals serve us solely as places to let off steam they can become quite ludicrous, terrifying documents. They can make us feel deeply ashamed. No wonder we would prefer to keep them secret!

Without a safe way of being able to process and interpret what we rant about in our journals the practice of reflective writing becomes unsustainable. The typical reaction is to abandon our journal – set fire to it perhaps – and decry the whole journaling practice as a waste of time that only gets us more wound up.

The more reflective way is to stay with it, accept our need to rant occasionally, accept that the voice in which we express our rant is rarely authentic, and wait and see what shows up next. Ranting can help us access the truth, as long as we’ve got the guts to stick around and reflect on what we’ve written. In this case we invariably find that ranting simply becomes intolerable to read. As one workshop participant told me: “There’s nowhere to hide when you’re writing to yourself.”

So if you’re struggling to get beyond ranting don’t give up. In fact do the opposite – keep ranting. Before too long your inner wisdom will kick in and you’ll find yourself discovering new insights and understanding. This is when the risk pays off.